


At the Beginning of the End

by Queen of the Castle (queen_of_the_castle_77)



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Drama, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Rape, Sexual Content, Torture, Violence, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-07
Updated: 2011-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-23 12:34:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/250367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_of_the_castle_77/pseuds/Queen%20of%20the%20Castle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Dimension Cannon finally started working, Rose crossed her fingers and hoped that one press of a button would deliver her straight into the Doctor’s arms. Yeah, she grumbled. As if it was ever going to be that easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> An AU fic that diverges from canon during the end of Season 3. The first part of this fic, which is Rose/Yana and rated PG, is a fluffy sort of romp at the end of the universe that can definitely be read as a standalone if you don't like the darker stuff. If you intend to read the later three chapters of this fic, though, please take note of the warnings and the higher rating.

When the Dimension Cannon finally started working, Rose crossed her fingers and hoped that one press of a button would deliver her straight into the Doctor’s arms.

Yeah, she grumbled. As if it was ever going to be that easy.

It could be worse, she supposed. The Dimension Cannon could have landed her at the beginning of the universe, before oxygen, where she’d have to hope the recall button worked quickly enough to pull her out of there before she suffocated. Or she could have ended up sometime a little further into Earth’s history, though not far enough. It would be just her luck to get eaten by dinosaurs just as she was finally making progress in getting back to the Doctor.

Those were the sorts of risks she’d decided she was willing to take.

She wondered why the Cannon had brought her here in particular, though, where the stars were _all_ gone, not just disappearing, and the last band of people seemed to be hiding from the ensuing darkness. Was it supposed to be a warning of what would come in both of her universes – _all_ universes – if she didn’t succeed? She knew that well enough without the practical demonstration, thanks.

Inside what the guards called ‘the silo’, it smelled like what Rose remembered of the slums of India from that time Torchwood had sent her there for a recovery mission; unwashed bodies in too much heat with too little space, and a hint of desperation adding spice to the rankness.

It made her sick, but not physically; she had a stronger stomach than that. Rose worried what would happen to those people if they couldn’t be saved before the end arrived.

An odd blue creature that reminded her of the first alien other than the Doctor who’d really talked with her – she felt terrible that she couldn’t remember the plumber’s name anymore, but so much had happened since then – was the one who informed her that the hope these people clung to might not be in vain.

“Chan, there is a way out, tho. Chan, the professor is working on it every day, tho.”

“The Professor?” Rose asked curiously. Chantho went off on a spiel so excited that Rose could barely follow the gist of it. There was some definite hero worship there. More than that, Rose was quick to realise. Chantho was clearly completely devoted to the man she spoke so gushingly about.

Rose had an inexplicable expectation that ‘the Professor’ might look like a cross between the Professor from Gilligan’s Island and someone of Chantho’s species (it was only later that Chantho told Rose she was the last of her kind, a reminder of a different alien which warmed Rose even more than the body heat of thousands of people packed together). It was a peculiar mental picture. The old man in his turn-of-the-20th-century get up seemed incredibly normal by comparison.

Rose could see why Chantho so clearly adored him. He was slightly arrogantly brilliant and slightly _off_ , but with an openness about him that suggested the end of his universe hadn’t burned him in quite the same way that the loss of Gallifrey had always so clearly marked the Doctor ever since Rose had known him. He was, in many ways, a lot like the Doctor had been in the last months she’d known him, when he’d seemed happier. It was hard not to like such a man, Rose found.

The Professor shook her hand so hard that she forgot for a moment that he was probably reaching the end of his life, hoping to hold on just a few more years, long enough to complete his work. In that moment, so happy to have someone new and seemingly interested in what he was doing to talk to, he acted more, like a puppy, fresh with enthusiasm.

Rose let his rough voice wash over her while her mind drifted.

This didn’t seem to be anywhere near her own time. Rose realised that much from how the Professor spoke of times long since passed and knowledge forgotten which Rose didn’t think had yet been discovered in the first place where she was from. Even in a parallel world, Rose couldn’t imagine things being so much more advanced that they’d got to _this_ stage of evolution before whatever was making the stars go out affected them. The Dimension Cannon, then, must have sent her off course. For all she knew, the only way the Cannon would let her enter a new universe might be right at the end of it, where the walls were somehow thinner. The Doctor would probably know better (or at least pretend to).

If this was the inevitable end of the universe rather than some mistake brought on billions of years too early like what was happening in the universe she’d found herself stuck in, Rose didn’t think it was up to her to stop it, any more than the Doctor had jumped in to stop the Earth from roasting on their first trip out together. It had taken her a while, but she had eventually learned that some things just had their time.

She knew that she should call for another jump with the Cannon. She clearly wasn’t in the right place, after all. The Doctor-tracking function she’d tried to rig up with the use of some of the odds and ends she’d had in her pocket that day she’d been stranded in the wrong universe clearly wasn’t working yet, for there was no sign of him here. Rose wondered whether he’d ever travelled this far into the future, or whether he feared the unavoidability of people dying and leaving him behind to continue on alone too much to want to see this final struggle for life. Rose could only stand it because she could see the Professor’s hope rather than just the possibility that it was ultimately futile.

Still, the Professor seemed to have any world-saving efforts pretty well in hand, anyway, from what Rose could tell. She should leave. She had other places to be.

She was so tired, though, having not been able to sleep a wink in the days since the Dimension Cannon had seemed to start working, far too jittery in the face of thoughts of that first jump. She just wanted to rest...

When she woke up, it took her a moment to remember where in the universe – or _universes_ , she realised – she was. It probably didn’t help that she didn’t wake where she’d fallen asleep, perched on a tiny stool with her face pressed uncomfortably against the unyielding surface of the bench in front of her. The hammock-like structure that she was lying on swayed slightly under her as she swivelled around, looking for Chantho or the Professor.

The Professor was doddering around at the back of the room, her view of him partly obscured by all sorts of hanging bits of string and such.

“Up again, I see!” he exclaimed when he noticed that she was openly regarding him with curiosity. “Good! Good! Nothing like a quick recharge to get your mind going again, I say. Now, would you mind handing me that piece of equipment just by your head and to the left? No, no, the L-shaped metallic one. That’s it. I usually have Chantho to help me with these things, you see, but she’s due for her own sleep cycle. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Um, no,” Rose said, pushing herself off the hammock and making her way across the maze of clutter to the Professor’s side. She placed the tool on the bench beside him. “Did you move me? While I was sleepin’, I mean.”

“Of course, of course,” the Professor murmured, and Rose wasn’t sure for a moment whether he was responding to her or having some kind of break through with... whatever it was that he was doing. Then he continued, “It was barely a moment’s work. You, my dear, are not so heavy that even an old man like me can’t shift you, and the bed was already made up. I use it when I want a quick kip, you see. Much more convenient than one of those silly little cubby holes out in the main living area that Chantho keeps trying to press me into when I’m a bit too run down to properly fight off her best intentions.”

Rose reached out and placed a hand lightly on the Professor’s arm. He stilled and looked up at her, giving her all of his attention suddenly instead of constantly trying to do seventeen things at once as he was clearly used to doing.

“Thank you,” Rose said.

“Well, there’s no point in a lovely young thing like yourself going and giving yourself a bad back so early in life,” the Professor replied with a conspiratory air, as if there was something secretive about the words. She supposed he might think it impertinent or some such for a man so much older than her to comment on her ‘loveliness’. He seemed that type.

Personally, Rose was mostly flattered. He was hardly like the old letches at the local pub who occasionally tried to cop a feel; he was far too mannered for that. While once upon a time she might have had a very different reaction all the same, she’d seen a lot weirder in recent years. If a tree and a Time Lord could flirt, and if someone like Jack Harkness could exist without the universe immediately exploding from sheer overload, then what was to say a man the Professor’s age couldn’t still cast an admiring eye wherever he liked. He was probably less than a tenth of the Doctor’s age, after all, and she certainly didn’t mind when _he’d_ occasionally gone a little slack-jawed at the sight of her in some new outfit, or at the way she’d sometimes caught him off guard by beaming happily at him just because she could.

“People keep showing up, you see,” the Professor was saying, apparently having moved onto one of his long explanations that Rose kept accidentally tuning out from. “Sometimes I really do wonder where they come from and how they get here, considering how little there is left of the universe outside this bunker. They can’t all be hiding out there on the surface somewhere among the futurekind without being sniffed out, surely. Whereabouts precisely did _you_ come from, Miss Tyler?”

“Oh, well, I’m not exactly par for the course,” Rose fobbed him off.

“Oh?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at her. He was so earnestly interested that Rose hesitated to lie to him, or to say that she couldn’t tell him, even though she knew she probably should. He’d been so kind to her, and she couldn’t imagine him trying to steal the Cannon technology from her, even though she could tell that the concept would blow his mind in a way that none of these odd devices that Rose couldn’t even begin to fathom the purpose of managed to faze him.

Perhaps that was what ultimately decided her; he was such a genius, so like the Doctor, that for once she wanted to prove that she had knowledge about something completely wonderful and unbelievable as well.

“I’m from another universe,” Rose admitted. “A parallel one. I’m crossing universes looking for someone I lost. He’s sorta one of a kind, though. Only one of him in _all_ the universes, or else things would probably go all wonky or explode or somethin’. I guess, thinkin’ about it like that, it’s not such a big surprise that I didn’t find him straight away. He’s a pretty small target, and I dunno how accurate this whole process is. It’s really just a bit of an accident that I ended up here. Not that it hasn’t been a nice little detour,” Rose was quick to assure him.

The Professor sounded like he was barely listening to that last bit anyway, having been distracted by the more important part of her speech. “Parallel universes... there have always been theories, as far as I can tell from what books are left from earlier times, but to think it could be a _reality_...”

“I’m livin’ proof and everythin’,” Rose said proudly.

“You’re extraordinary,” the Professor claimed.

Rose blushed. “Er, well, not really. Not me. I’m just a girl.”

“But that’s what makes you so spectacular,” he insisted.

It was exactly the sort of thing Rose remembered that the Doctor would unexpectedly come out with sometimes. Rose smiled and leaned forward, pressing her lips to the Professor’s cheek in a quick kiss. “Thank you,” she said sincerely.

“Oh, well,” the Professor said, flustered. “Thank _you_ , Miss Tyler. It’s been such a very long time since anyone so young and pretty paid any attention to the mad old professor working away in the bowels of this place. It’s nice have something to keep me going other than the hope that I might get this lot working some day.”

Rose smiled encouragingly. “Of course you’ll sort it out. You’re brilliant.”

She’d had no idea she had the power to make a man blush so deeply so easily. It was sort of intoxicating, and she could imagine wanting to stick around just to have someone pay her that sort of attention, and to help him in any way that she could considering how little she understood of what he was actually doing.

She had a job to do, though. The stars weren’t going to stop themselves from going out, as far as Rose could tell. Also, Rose thought that she liked Chantho, with her all-too-clear crush, a little too much to make her go through watching on as the Professor looked at someone else the way she clearly wanted him to notice her once she got back from her nap, or hibernation, or whatever her species did at times like this. Rose knew what it was like to be overlooked for someone else, after all. It wasn’t a hurt that she’d wish on anyone else if she could help it.

“I wish I could stay and help...” Rose began carefully.

“Oh, but you have to be moving on, don’t you?” The Professor smiled, as if he didn’t begrudge her how easily she could just pop out of the hard situation he and the others were stuck in. Perhaps he didn’t. He seemed so selfless. “You have universes to see! If I had that sort of power, I’d never sit still, which is really saying something at my age, let me tell you.” He may not have looked resentful, but there was a wistful air about him.

Rose understood at least part of the reason why the Doctor picked up strays. She’d seen it out there. How could she not want to share that?

“I’d take you with me if I could,” Rose said truthfully. “But somehow I don’t think you need my help to get out there and see the rest of space. You’re almost there already, see. And I can’t stay here either. Never know what it could do to things, havin’ someone who’s not supposed to be here around. I’ve learned that bit the hard way. You probably shouldn’t mention who I am or how I got here to anyone just in case.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” the Professor vowed with a short bow. Rose got the impression that he was far too pleased that she’d entrusted it to him to even think of betraying that. “I promise also that I will try to have as much confidence in myself as you have in me, my dear. And I will hope that somehow your marvellous universe-travelling ability will allow our paths to cross again.”

Rose reached out and patted his hand affectionately. “Tell you what. The Doctor might be able to give you a hand with all this! When I find him – that’s who I’m lookin’ for, by the way, the Doctor – I’ll get him to bring us back here if I can. I dunno whether it’s possible, since this might not be his universe. But I’ll definitely try.”

She caught a yearning in his eyes as she faded away at the press of a button. It made her even more intent on finding the Doctor, who she’d last seen disappearing before her eyes in just such a way.

The Dimension Cannon worked, clearly, well enough to take her right to the ends of some universe, regardless of whether or not it was the right one. It might need some fine tuning, but this was the closest she’d been to getting back to the Doctor since Canary Wharf. She wasn’t going to let anything keep her away for long now.


	2. Part Two

“What is it about you that’s special enough to catch a Time Lord’s eye?” the Master pondered, peering through the bars intently before sneering and shoving himself away from her. He paced around the room as if he couldn’t keep still. “Admittedly I was disgustingly human at the time, and the Doctor’s always been a poor excuse for a Time Lord, but even his TARDIS cried for you in particular when I tore open her heart. ‘Rose Tyler’, she screamed, as well as another thing. Tell me, Miss Tyler –”

Rose flinched, remembering the sound of that name spoken in a softer voice that apparently belonged to the same man but really _didn’t_ , as far as she was concerned.

“– what is ‘Bad Wolf’?” the Master breathed.

Rose glared silently at him.

“Aw, don’t be like that. You’re no fun,” the Master said, contorting his face for a moment into an expression like a petulant two year old’s, then snapping so quickly into a sharp stare that a worry grew in Rose’s mind that he might just break her neck on a whim during one of those lightning-fast mood swings of his. He _was_ obviously unstable, after all.

“Is this Bad Wolf thing what allows you to travel between universes? I’d like to do that myself. The TARDIS – _my_ TARDIS now – is a little broken, you see. But who needs time and space when I could hold all of reality in my hands?”

Rose’s shiver was reminiscent of the unexpected shudder that had run through her when she’d arrived here, even before she’d known what awaited her. _Something_ had felt wrong about this jump. She’d thought at a glance that it looked like around about her time and that it _had_ to be London. It had looked like _Rose’s_ London as well, from her original universe. That was what had kept her there despite the pervading feeling of dread. The Doctor could have been just around the corner, for all she knew, and she had to find out for sure. The only people waiting for her, apparently, were the black-ops-looking team that had swarmed in and grabbed her less than a minute after she’d appeared, which made it clear just _what_ was wrong.

She was glad, in retrospect, that she’d accidentally dropped the device that linked her up to the Dimension Cannon over the low brick fence beside which she’d appeared as she’d struggled with his people. It had meant she hadn’t been able to get away, obviously, but better that, and better the device potentially fall into the hands of some curious five year old who lived in the neighbourhood, than having him finding her with it and realising its purpose. That other universe might still not feel quite like _hers_ , but it and the other universes she’d found her way through before she’d arrived here didn’t deserve to be ruled by anyone like _him_.

The people who’d captured her had brought her before this man who insisted other people actually refer to him as ‘the Master’ (if that wasn’t a complex and a half, Rose didn’t know what was), and even forced to her knees in front of him as if she really was his slave. He’d looked down on her, literally, with such a fiery look that Rose knew immediately that he somehow already knew her, and hated her enough that he’d had his people waiting for her, as if she’d somehow done him a wrong that he couldn’t wait to repay.

She bitterly thought in those first moments that it would be nice if she at least knew who _he_ was in return. As soon as she began to get even a sense of who he was, though, she took that back. She’d rather she’d never met him.

It had taken her a while to figure out how dangerous he was. When he’d gloated about being a Time Lord, much like the way the Doctor sometimes bragged about his intelligence, she’d almost thought she’d found the Doctor again after all, albeit in the wrong body. The Doctor had been so completely adamant that he was the only one left, and this man had obviously known who she was straight away. It wasn’t as if the Doctor hadn't gone a bit weird for a while after the last regeneration, after all, so he could easily have lost some of his memories, or changed in attitude or something.

But he’d quickly proven he wasn’t the Doctor; that he could never be. The Doctor didn’t have it in him to be so gleeful in cruelty, no matter what body he was in.

Yet the Master had still somehow known her (and not just her name, but specific things about her) despite not being _him_. He’d even anticipated and been specifically looking out for her arrival from another universe. She couldn’t figure out how that was possible until something specific that he’d said jogged her memory and allowed her to see beyond the cruelly mad glint in his eyes.

He’d regenerated, all right, but not from the Doctor. He’d instead been someone to whom she’d explained all about her quest from parallel to parallel, looking for a man named the Doctor who she’d had no idea he could have known. Of _course_ he’d figured she’d eventually make her way here, to this time and place, and known to watch for her; the Doctor might no longer have a home planet, but this time and place was his home away from home, and he always seemed to come back here. Except when he idiotically landed his TARDIS right in front of a deranged half-brother (or whatever Time-Lord-version-of-a-daytime-soap-opera connection the two of them really had) and practically handed him the keys with his best wishes for a speedy journey, apparently.

Now the Doctor was stuck at the end of the universe, and she was stuck right here, finally having ended up where she’d been aiming for the Cannon to send her. Personally, though, she thought he had the better deal.

The demise of everything in the universe hadn’t seemed so bad, after all, in comparison.

If the Master was to be believed, this was a beginning, not an ending. But with the Doctor nowhere in sight, and Rose unable to break free, and the Master being insane enough to enjoy the thought of torturing and slaughtering every living thing he could find regardless of whether it stood in the way of his path to domination or not, it seemed like this might eventually be the _real_ death of everything that mattered.

* * *

In any other situation, Rose would have been dying to get out of her tiny cage. With the Master, though, she was grateful for the barrier of bars between them. So when he ordered her out of that odd little safe place of hers, and grabbed her head and _yanked_ her through the opening when she hesitated, she knew it wasn’t a good sign.

She suspected her ability to suddenly roam the length and width of an entire bedroom as she pleased rather than merely curl up in a too-small cage wasn’t a sign of increased freedom at all. She was quickly proven right. It just meant that she was to be subjected to a different sort of cage; one she had to impose upon herself or else choose to disobey and to die.

There had been a time when Rose hadn’t realised just how much she was willing to bear to get what she wanted. She couldn’t have imagined spending years apart from the Doctor, working tirelessly to help create all sorts of devices and safeguards just on the off-chance she could get back to him, but she had done it. She’d travelled from parallel to parallel and had to live through some truly horrific things, but she’d borne that as well.

She’d always had a strong survival instinct on top of her need not to settle for less than what she knew she wanted. She wasn’t sure just then whether to regret that, but she knew one thing: she _had_ to get through this, no matter what.

The taste of the woman’s skin on Rose’s tongue was like ashes; something that should have been merely tainted was instead burned to all the way to cinders by the regard of pleased eyes from across the room. She could have stood this better if only the Master didn’t clearly get so much enjoyment from it. Rose nearly choked on the bitterness when the scrape of a wedding ring over her skin raised the tiny hairs on her arm. She was reminded that she wasn’t the only one here against her will, though she wondered whether the other woman was also doing it under the threat of death or something far more complicated.

Rose almost understood why the Master enjoyed watching her squirm with revulsion from having this forced on her. He hated her, and everything she represented. He wanted to punish her for countless things, including a number that Rose didn’t think she could understand even if he tried to explain them. But why in the universe did he want to do the same to his own _wife_?

There was still some light in Lucy’s Saxon’s eyes that Rose could see when their eyes met just moments before their lips. Rose doubted it would last much longer. She didn’t seem like a particularly strong sort of woman.

Even Rose wasn’t sure how long it might be before _she_ broke, and she was far more determined. Lucy Saxon didn’t stand a chance.

When Lucy’s nails scraped at Rose’s hip bone just moments before they carded down through short hairs, Rose tensed, knowing what was coming. It disgusted her that the Master clearly wasn’t going to be completely happy unless he could watch her being made to enjoy this on some level. When Rose’s hips bucked involuntarily, he laughed in the corner, and Rose couldn’t quite stop herself from showing the slight weakness of hiding her face in Lucy’s shoulder in that moment.

Lucy murmured something unintelligible but somehow comforting in Rose’s ear, and Rose wondered suddenly if this was the most affectionate touch the Master’s wife ever shared. Knowing him...

Just the thought of it made her unbearably sad.

She held onto Lucy much the way she gripped her sense of hope. The Master laughed at both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine that, although Yana wouldn't give away that Rose had been there (since he promised he wouldn't) even when the Doctor brings Rose up, Yana's reaction to hearing about her would be very different than in canon. In this universe, then, he's focused more on finally putting together 'Rose' and 'the Doctor' that she mentioned she was looking for and therefore fails to overhear that Rose looked into the Time Vortex. He therefore knows that Rose has done something to make Jack how he is, but doesn't know what or how, and figures it's part of the same power that allows her to traverse universes.
> 
> Just figured I'd better explain this change in case anyone's wondering why the Master doesn't already know what 'Bad Wolf' is, because I'm thorough that way. :)


	3. Part Three

Even almost constantly isolated from everyone else on the ship, except when the Master grew bored and sought her out for entertainment, there were things that Rose could learn by observation. Still, that the Master had no real intention of killing her took her little while to figure out, given the way he often acted as if he’d like nothing more than to rip into her with his bare hands.

Rose did eventually come to that realisation, though, at about the same time she realised that the Master would do absolutely anything to the Doctor _except_ kill him. She might not ever be allowed to see the Doctor, but the Master took the same sort of glee in regaling her with stories of what he did to him as he took in visiting his frustrations upon on Rose. It seemed that there was something there – a connection – that the Master clearly despised but couldn’t quite bring himself to get rid of when it came to the two of them.

There wasn’t much she could do with the knowledge other than file it away, unfortunately, because the fact that the Master didn’t _intend_ to kill her hardly meant that he _wouldn’t_ do it. The Master was so unpredictable that even he himself likely couldn’t know for sure whether he ever would snap and finish her off, or what might prompt him if he did. But the fact that he seemed to _want_ to keep her alive was still a good sort of knowledge to have, Rose thought.

The problem was that the Master was much better at observing than she was. Even before she figured out that her life wasn’t in quite as much danger as she’d initially thought, the Master determined that threats to her life weren’t the best way to get her to comply anyway.

Rose hated to let him know how good he was at pressing her buttons, but when someone else’s life was in danger because of her, she just wasn’t very good at hiding her fear for them.

It was precisely why she’d grown not to mind it so much comparatively when the Master got it into his head to bring Lucy along with him into Rose’s little cell room. Lucy’s life was probably even less at risk of being ended than Rose’s. She acted more like a puppet whose strings her husband pulled just as he liked than someone who actually gave a damn what was happening to her anymore. There was no reason for the Master to want her dead when she was close enough to it already, and when he clearly still found her useful at times. Lucy Saxon had been subjugated long before the rest of the human race. Rose still didn’t know the details of what had finally cracked her. She supposed it didn’t matter. Something empty and too-pliable had been left behind regardless of the cause.

It didn’t mean that Rose didn’t still feel overwhelming anger and disgust at her own actions when Lucy was pushed into the room half-naked and looking mostly sort of blank. She felt those same things even more so towards the Master for orchestrating the whole thing, but she always felt part of the blame herself. What it did mean, though, was the difference between it being something she could live through, or something capable of breaking her down into a shadow not all that different from Lucy herself.

When he wasn’t accompanied by Lucy, the Master usually came alone or with a few guards, and often with some kind of hostage. It wasn’t odd, then, for Rose to see some person being pushed unwilling through the doorway, their fear too obvious for Rose to ever consider ignoring it. The person who was brought into the room on this particular occasion, though, didn’t seem as though they were going to be left sitting in the corner of the room with a threat over their head so that Rose would do whatever was asked of her with no more complaint than the bare hatred in her eyes. This person struggled far too valiantly for it to be anything so simple.

The Jones girl – the older one, not the one with the firmly-set jaw and the purposeful glare that had disappeared right in front of all of them while the Master set his pet aliens on the Earth for the first time – fought so hard against the two guards that dragged her in that Rose thought she must have almost dislocated something. The look in her eyes went beyond fear, somehow.

Rose’s insides clenched with dread, just as the Master clearly knew would happen. He wasn’t human, but he still understood a disturbing amount about human nature all the same.

She could manage to do this sort of thing with Lucy, who alternately didn’t seem to mind or care, depending on her mood. She wasn’t sure she could do _this_ , though, whatever the threat.

“I brought you a new playmate, Miss Tyler,” the Master announced, as if that wasn’t already perfectly clear. “I considered the Doctor, since I know you two have been pining for each other so pitifully that I’m surprised he hasn’t regenerated from unresolved lust alone at some point over the years, but given his current state... well, that might be fun later, actually. For now, this is a much more aesthetically pleasing option for me to watch.”

The Jones girl had to be practically ripped out of her maid’s uniform. Rose stood back and didn’t help or even watch, for she refused to be a part of it.

She was willing to do a lot of things to get through this. After all, she couldn’t help anyone, much less herself, if she got herself killed over something like pride or bodily integrity, which she tried as hard as she could to force herself to see as somehow smaller sacrifices in light of the hundreds of millions of human lives lost by fire or torture or outright massacre since the Master had taken over.

She could give up a lot on her own behalf, but she wouldn’t tear it away from someone else unwillingly. That was her line in the sand.

If the girl made the decision herself, Rose would play along just as she always had with Lucy. She’d make it into something covertly comforting, if she could manage to do so under the Master’s watch. A slide of skin over skin, a quick squeeze of hands, a whisper of, “We’ll get out of this. Just hold on,” in her ear too low for even the Master’s sensitive hearing to pick up. Rose could do that.

The Jones girl cried and shook and covered her breasts with one arm as soon as her bra was ripped free, leaving her completely bare, stripped of any last scraps of self-possession she might have been holding onto just as surely as she’d been stripped of her clothing.

Rose had been trying not to watch or listen to any of it, but the Master’s clearing of his throat wasn’t the sort of thing that it was a good idea to ignore. The Master raised an eyebrow and looked pointedly at the girl.

Rose stepped forward slowly, as if approaching a wild animal (she thought she might as well be, in that moment) and lightly grasped the girl’s hand. It was nothing like the warm and easy grip that she and the Doctor used to share so often, but it was still a kind of cold comfort. Rose glided her thumb over the ridges of the girl’s fingers. Her skin was soft, unlike most of the contact Rose received lately. Rose entwined their fingers, much to the Master’s audible amusement.

The girl didn’t pull away from that touch, but she did spring backward when Rose pressed a tender kiss to her lips. Their faces were still close enough that their breath mingled, for the girl didn’t have any real room to retreat, but Rose had no illusions that the girl wouldn’t have fled all the way to another continent if she could have.

I’m trying to save your life, Rose tried to convey through just a look, This is the only way I can.

The return expression told her everything she needed to know.

The girl wasn’t going to give in. Not even to save herself.

The Master ordered Rose to push her down onto the bed. Rose hesitated, steeling herself, and then turned to face him, away from the girl. She remained stubbornly motionless as she stared him down. There was a visible challenge in her eyes that she knew was dangerous to aim his way, but she did so anyway.

It didn’t even need saying out loud. She and the Master had unfortunately spent enough time in each other’s presence that body language often said it all. However, Rose supposed the girl’s hysterical words clinched it.

“Stop it! Let me go! I won’t! I won’t do it, I won’t! You can’t make me! I won’t!”

And so Rose wouldn’t either, no matter what it would cost either of them.

Rose knew the consequences of not following the Master’s orders better now than she did when he’d first had his people snatch her unawares off a quiet city street. She’d be punished until some tiny part of her might wish he’d wanted her dead after all, but he did that sort of thing often for no real reason at all. She could take it, knowing she had to.

The Jones girl, though...

Rose might have ultimately saved her had she forced her to comply, but she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t anything like as cruel as the Master and never could be, even as a kindness.

The girl was given one last chance to give in, which was more leniency than the Master would usually allow. Rose thought it might be more a case of him drawing out the agony on purpose than because he truly expected there was even a small chance she’d change her mind.

The Jones girl gathered her wits just far enough to hurl foul curses rather than useless denials at the Master and his guards. Rose couldn’t imagine a girl like her ever voicing such things in a better world, but it had been a long time since any of them had seen one of those.

The Master nodded curtly at the guards, and the Jones girl was pulled out of the room.

Rose tried to ignore the screams as they echoed down the hallway, fainter now that the girl had been taken elsewhere but not soft enough that Rose couldn’t still make out the nuance of those noises. She tried not to cringe at the accompanying cracks of a whip (unmistakable even from a distance given how well acquainted Rose now was with it). Rose tried even harder not to react to the way the whimpers and screams were eventually abruptly silenced.

Rose had never even known her first name.

The Master didn’t leave to go watch the girl’s torture or death. Instead, he remained in the room with Rose, studying every tiny flicker of her closed expression with a manic sort of intensity.

She flinched away at last, unable to control herself any longer, and he smiled.


	4. Part Four

They’d been building up to this since before Rose knew the Master _was_ the Master, she supposed, when it had been just appreciation rather than obsession driving him. If it had to happen at all, she would have much preferred that it be with that kindly older man she’d met who’d reminded her in so many ways of the Doctor. He, at least, wouldn’t have tried to hurt her as much as he possibly could. He certainly would never have tied the Doctor in place right there in the corner of the room, watching unwillingly from the Master’s usual vantage point.

She hadn’t been allowed to see the Doctor since the day the Earth was conquered and he’d been captured. His surprise and alarm at the sight of Rose Tyler – who he’d clearly never thought he’d see again, and certainly not _there_ – half-lying at the Master’s feet chained and bruised and with her breath coming shallowly from an injury to her ribs had stayed with Rose. They’d had no time to communicate anything beyond that look to each other. All she knew of him since then was what the Master told her, and none of that was anything even approaching good.

She had no idea how long had passed since she’d seen him then, but it felt like it surely had to be years. She’d forgotten how bad he’d looked after the Master was done with him... how frail.

She wondered whether he thought the same thing when he looked at her now. She almost wasn’t any more recognisable as that girl who’d held his hand and skipped carelessly towards her Mum’s Estate flat just before everything went to hell than he was recognisable as the Doctor.

Still, even though she must have been trapped here practically forever, and even though by seeking him out again she’d found a place far worse than a universe without him in it where the stars were going out, she wouldn’t be back in the relative safety of that parallel for anything just at that moment.

He might not look like the Doctor externally in any other way, but he still had the same determined eyes. Rose saw in them that he had a plan, and that there was, as she’d tried to tell herself for _so long_ , a reason to hang on and a light at the end of the tunnel.

The Master gripped at her skin hard, determined to make both of them really feel it. Rose held onto the Doctor’s gaze with a far greater type of resolve.

She mostly tuned out the Master’s voice beyond the vague awareness that he was trying to explain away what he was doing. She didn’t have to hear his exact words or even the tone of them to know it was obviously pretence. The way he couldn’t stop himself from occasionally gentling the run of his fingertips across her skin had nothing to do with finding new ways to torture Rose and the Doctor, as he’d tried to claim. She knew better by now. He clearly couldn’t stand it, but the fact remained that he could no more shake the memory of looking at Rose like she was something magnificent than he could rid himself of the drumbeat in his head that he was forever going on about. Human or not, that man had still been _him_ in a way. He still remembered doing and feeling those things.

Rose was certain that this, then, was more about his obsession with both Rose and the Doctor than about their feelings for each other.

At least it was that way for the Master. For Rose, she just looked at the Doctor and tried to communicate everything she could through her eyes as the Master tried to hurt and humiliate her, and through her make the Doctor feel the same. She hoped he was trying to ignore the Master just as she was, but she supposed she’d had far more experience with this type of thing than he had by now, nine hundred years of life aside.

She’d hardly say that she was desensitised to it, but being in any way _used_ to this type of treatment was still an incredibly scary prospect.

The only time Rose slipped and let loose a pained expression was when the Doctor was finally taken away. It was a mistake she immediately regretted making. She knew that the Master picked up on it immediately – that the absence of the Doctor was much more painful than his presence, even through something like this – for he laughed at length at her for giving herself away.

The Doctor wouldn’t be brought back again, she knew. She gritted her teeth and remembered: there _was_ a plan. She’d still see him again, and hopefully soon.

The Master kissed Rose, and she really wished she’d taken the opportunity to bite off his tongue so he’d have to stop _talking_ all of the time, until the next regeneration healed him at least. She couldn’t do that, though. She had to get through this as whole as possible, and she didn’t really fancy the eye-for-an-eye punishment; he was just the sort to amuse himself by using such a human ideology as long as it suited him.

He didn’t show how much it annoyed him that she didn’t seem any more affected by him finally touching her himself than she had been by the rest of things he frequently put her through, but she knew it was there in amongst all his other churning thoughts, obviously not quite drowned out by that mysterious drumbeat of his.

He could just add it to that silent seething he felt about the many other ways in which she’d frustrated him, she decided.

She’d never told him what Bad Wolf meant, or how she’d jumped from place to place and even universe to universe without a TARDIS (she was so very glad now that the Professor hadn’t pressed her to explain the mechanics of it all, contenting himself with being awed by the mere idea). He’d never seemed to figure any of it out on his own, either. And if he’d ever figured out what it was about her that had made the Professor smile so fondly after knowing her for such a short time, or what it was that made the Doctor love her (for she was _sure_ he did now, even if the words had never been said, since she’d seen it in his eyes before he’d been pulled out of the room), or what made the Master himself somehow unable to let go of her... well, if he had, then he certainly didn’t let on.

This indulgence of his in finally allowing himself to have her, she thought, had probably been supposed to solve those mysteries for him. It clearly hadn’t. He was angry, but for once he didn’t take that emotion out on her beyond sucking so hard on her neck that he left a mark, like ownership.

Rose wanted to scrub it away once he’d left the room, though she knew she couldn’t. Still, she told herself that it was just physical, like everything else. Whatever the Master might think, she felt more like her own person right then than she’d been in a long time.

Unlike Lucy, she hadn’t reached her breaking point. Now she knew that she wasn’t going to let that happen no matter what. Not with the sure knowledge that there was something waiting for her, just out of her reach for now, but not forever.

* * *

When Lucy shot the Master, Rose was surprised but not grieved (she hadn’t thought Lucy had it in her, to be honest).

She didn’t begrudge the Doctor his pained cries, though, even if she personally felt more than a little glad that the bastard was dead. The Doctor’s need to keep him alive wasn’t even really about _him_ , after all. Whatever else the Master was, he was a Time Lord. Rose knew how the Doctor felt about the loss of his people and his planet. She thought all of them there in the _Valiant_ might have an idea of those feelings now, actually, having lost so much themselves.

Rose knew that it probably wasn’t the worst of the ways she’d find she’d been affected, but it still hurt her that she couldn’t quite let Jack hug her when he tried to offer her what should have been much-needed comfort. She looked at him and intellectually knew he was, and always had been, a safe haven, yet she couldn’t help the instinct to shy away. He seemed to understand. Good for him, Rose thought, since she certainly didn’t.

When the Doctor left the Master slumped on the ground and came to her, she didn’t try to hug him either. What she did do was extend a hand, which he grasped with such feeling that that small touch was somehow better than a full-bodied embrace could have been anyway.

That smallest touch that she’d been searching out for so long was what finally broke something inside her, though Rose found she didn’t mourn _that_ loss.

For the first time in she didn’t know how long, to the tune of the words the Doctor whispered close to her ear without quite touching her, Rose Tyler let herself cry.

~FIN~


End file.
